Jim Tynen – Civitas Institutehttp://www.nccivitas.org
North Carolina's Conservative VoiceThu, 24 May 2018 16:07:33 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.52016 Civitas Annual Reporthttp://www.nccivitas.org/2017/2016-civitas-annual-report/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/2016-civitas-annual-report/#respondTue, 09 May 2017 18:29:17 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=22655CivitasAR_16 5.9.17
]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/2016-civitas-annual-report/feed/0Other States Do More to Ease Licensing Burdenhttp://www.nccivitas.org/2017/states-ease-licensing-burden/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/states-ease-licensing-burden/#commentsWed, 19 Apr 2017 15:28:20 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=22565Politicians love to talk about how they “create” jobs. And at least two other states are taking action to cut back on occupational licensing, which puts unreasonable burdens on people who just want to work. But there’s little sign North Carolina is making similar progress.

Recently Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, issued an executive order aimed at cutting down licensing regulations in his state.

Ducey has ordered a bunch of state boards and commissions to review every requirement for each type of license, and justify licensing requirements that exceed national averages.

“Government should never stand in the way of someone’s efforts to start a new life or profession,” Ducey said.

Meanwhile, Mississippi has passed a law reforming occupational licensing, Reason.com reports. The key element of the law mandates that before instituting new licensing requirements the state must try less burdensome ways of protecting the public. Possible measures include leaving the matter to competition in the market; relying on consumer-rating systems such as those found online; or accepting private certification processes.

Those are encouraging steps. Sadly, here in the Tar Heel State licensing still seems well entrenched.

Getting such approval from state government is often a heavy burden for people trying to improve their lives, we noted in 2015. In North Carolina, manicurists must undergo 300 hours of training and pass an exam. Would-be auctioneers must either serve a two-year apprenticeship or receive the equivalent of 80 hours of classroom instruction. If you want to braid hair legally, you’ll need to spend 1,500 hours at a beauty school and pass an exam.

Not much as changed, and even attempts at reform seem very limited. As NC Capitol Connection has reported, in mid-March, state Senate approved Senate Bill 8, “Easing Occupational Licensing on Military Families.”

The bill would allow a military-trained applicant or the spouse of a service member to work for one year in a licensed occupation while applying for that license. However, the applicant must have performed the occupation in another jurisdiction that has requirements “substantially equivalent” to North Carolina’s.

SB8 passed the Senate and was sent to the House; at last report it was in the House Finance Committee.

But the bill itself, while well-intentioned, actually highlights the injustice of occupational licensing.

First, if an applicant can work in NC for a year with no license, why is the license needed? These professionals would have shown in action they are qualified and responsible; why should bureaucrats in Raleigh then say they can’t work here?

Second, why is a North Carolina license needed if another state has already certified that professional? After all, North Carolina reciprocates concealed-weapons permit privileges from any other state. If we accept other states’ standards for carrying heat, why can’t we accept other states’ standards for cutting hair, doing landscaping, and the hundreds of other jobs that require the approval of Big Brother in Raleigh?

Third, of course military families face special problems because they are so often transferred. But consider, for example, a professional whose spouse is transferred by a private corporation to NC. Shouldn’t there be a similar exemption for that person?

Then what about someone who moves here because of the booming economy and the presence of both mountains and beaches?

Finally, what about someone born here who just wants to practice a profession?

All this just brings out the crux of the problem: The vast majority of jobs covered by state licenses never pose a threat to the safety or well-being of the public. Many of the professions are self-regulated by professional organizations or existing laws. Finally, the market is a better safeguard than bureaucratic red tape.

Its avowed purpose is “to ensure the protection of the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of this State receiving massage and bodywork therapy services.” It passed the House on first reading, and went to the Committee on Regulatory Reform.

Yet there’s no obvious need for such a law. If people get a bad massage, how are they harmed? They may be less relaxed than they hoped, but that’s not a health threat.

Then they’ll stop patronizing that business, or even post bad reviews online. Massage and bodywork establishments that provide subpar services will go out of business before a licensing board could even get the first form filled out.

Who likely has the most to gain from these licensing schemes? There is one class of suspects. In any field, large, established corporations can more easily absorb the costs and burdens of licensing. To smaller, newer competitors, dealing with more regulation is relatively much more expensive and difficult. It’s not unknown for big business to covertly support occupational licensing to hobble the competition.

In any case, we’ll see what happens in North Carolina with occupational licensing. At the moment, however, it looks as if Arizona and even Mississippi are far ahead of us. That’s bad news for thousands of North Carolinians who just want a chance to ply a profession and improve their lives.

Cultural Marxism seeks to destroy traditional institutions of Western Civilization

You may have seen some of the bizarre things happening at universities recently and thought these students and professors must be stupid, crazy or just ignorant of what freedom is all about.

But professor and writer Mike Adams this week said the opposite is true: campus radicals attacking free speech and traditional culture know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it: to foment a Marxist revolution.

“What [campus radicals] are trying to do is radically transform the culture,” he said. “The mechanism of changing the culture revolves around free speech and that’s why this is a huge issue for us.”

Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, outlined the real basis for campus speech codes and other left-wing causes in his talk March 7 at the Icon Lecture Series in Chapel Hill.

What was most interesting to me was how he took us behind the curtain to show us the real motivations and goals of so many of the outlandish goings-on at colleges and universities. I suppose most of us read about campus radicals, and perhaps mutter about their protests and complaints, but then shrug our shoulders and go on about our business.

After all, their complaints seem so absurd and random. Adams mentioned a professor who told an assembled group about a professor who said he identified as male on Monday, Wednesday and Friday … and identified as female on Tuesdays and Thursday. (It wasn’t clear what that professor identified as on weekends.) That is so far out to most of us that we don’t take it too seriously.

But it’s all part of a long-term, relentless strategy to weaken the culture, paving the way for a Marxist transformation of society, he said. For, in addition to the economic Marxism we’re familiar with, there’s cultural Marxism, in which radicals seek to fundamentally transform society to undermine the family, religion, morality, and other forces that might stand in the way of radicalism.

Fighting Free Speech

First of all, he said, we have to understand the key Marxist axiom: From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs.

But “who on earth would think that’s a good deal – ‘I want to be average’?” Adams said. “Marxism is for losers. I mean that literally: It benefits losers.”

So Marxism can’t be sold to people able to understand its goals. “You can’t possibly have radical transformation of the culture unless you interfere with the marketplace of ideas,” he said of leftists. “Their success in getting really bad ideas accepted on campuses has hinged on their ability to interfere with freedom of expression and to undermine the First Amendment.”

He recalled arriving on the campus of UNC Wilmington and finding that the student handbook included a speech code that proclaimed people “had a right to be comfortable and unoffended”! But, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, “Every idea is an incitement.”

Almost anything might offend somebody somewhere – especially if he or she has been primed to take offense. That handbook, for instance, said students could be punished for “misdirected laughter,” if while laughing they happened to glance at someone nearby.

Again, this may be absurd, but don’t be distracted: If leftists can get students to fear thinking and talking, they will lose their ability to resist leftist propaganda.

There has been some progress in cutting back speech codes on campus, he said, but the same strategy has continued with the assault on “microaggressions” – harmless comments or actions that the Left construes as racist. For that too is a prong of the attack on society, Adams said.

“White privilege” in cultural Marxism is the counterpart of capitalism in economic capitalism, radicals believe. “They need to overthrow capitalism in the economic level and ‘white privilege’ in the cultural level,” Adams said.

And how is that done?

Creating More Losers

If communism is for losers, then it’s also essential for communists to create more losers. The vehicles for that kind of cultural change are mandatory student fees and campus centers for special groups, he said.

These centers and fee-funded projects aim to destroy students’ moral bearings, leaving them psychologically and spiritually weaker, thus in greater need of powerful government to help them. Adams cited a “poetry” journal published under the aegis of a campus student center. It included a poem about Mother Teresa that can’t even be described in our newspaper. “It was worse than anything you’d find written on the walls of a bar on Franklin Street,” Adams said.

Or consider the “orgasm awareness day” sponsored by Western Carolina University or the “orgasm awareness week” sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill, he said.

“What is behind all of sexual politics … is just of a larger scheme to transform the culture,” he said. “What they really want to do is to destroy marriage.”

That’s why young, impressionable people are targeted by Left, he said. “It’s as if they’re being preyed upon by these cultural warriors.”

“They’re trying to sexualize our children, because what they’re really trying to do is take a look at sex and marriage and procreation and split them from one another,” he continued. “Because if you want to have a big government in a Marxist society, you have to have weak families.”

He did note that parents and lawmakers are beginning to understand these influences, and are fighting back successfully. But anyone there that night who truly grasped his talk understands one thing above all: Defeating cultural Marxism will require that we treat it very seriously indeed.

]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/mike-adams-silly-campus-stunts-serious-business/feed/2Fake News? Beware of All Newshttp://www.nccivitas.org/2017/fake-news-beware-news/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/fake-news-beware-news/#commentsMon, 27 Feb 2017 15:51:10 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=22187People are waking up to the danger of fake news – phony stories hyped up by the media and politicians — but we news consumers have to be alert to the subtler slanting of the news that happens every day.

And I mean every day. Just as an experiment, on the morning of Feb. 24 I looked over the News & Observer’s website to see what I might find in terms of news that is distorted subtly – and therefore dangerously.

The non-news news story

Take an Associated Press story from a day earlier. Its lead – the first and most important part of the story – reads: “The NAACP is announcing plans for an economic boycott of North Carolina to protest laws enacted by the state’s conservative General Assembly, including one limiting LGBT protections.”

Note how little substance or urgency this article has. It’s about an announcement about a PR event that is scheduled to announce something an activist group hopes will happen in the future.

Will knowing this a day ahead of time matter to a typical reader? Of course not, it’s just hype.

But the AP and N&O, just by creating this item, have made it seem important.

The real problem is that no one reads a newspaper with full attention. We glance over it. But that’s exactly why these tactics are so insidious: We readers don’t have our guard up, and these factoids get into our minds without our even noticing.

This distortion of the news continues right down to the final paragraph: “Previously, the NAACP held a 15-year economic boycott of South Carolina over the flying of the Confederate battle flag on Statehouse grounds. That boycott ended with the flag’s removal in 2015.”

This is a classic logical fallacy: just because two things happened at the same time doesn’t mean that one caused the other. But of course we newspaper readers aren’t focused on that, so this too may well slip right by us.

You have more important things to do than look the facts up, but Civitas generously lets me monkey around with this kind of thing, so I did.

The 15-year period cited saw South Carolina’s real GDP rise from $145 billion to $179 billion, according to stastista.com. That doesn’t sound terrible, does it?

Moreover, the economy of a state is subject to a huge number of variables. South Carolina’s economy is larger than those of Greece, or the Czech Republic, or New Zealand. It’s impossible to say whether one tiny variable had any effect, and it’s extremely unlikely it did. But just by the way it arranged the words, the N&O made it seem as if the boycott was a huge success.

The lonely quote

Then there’s the single person who is taken, for no apparent reason, as a representative of some large story. That’s behind the N&O story about a Triad area billboard reading: “Real men provide, Real women appreciate it.”

Here’s another trade secret: Any news story needs quotations. In a state of 10 million people, it’s not too hard to find someone who will say something mildly interesting. The hidden implication, however, is that what the person says is correct.

The item says the billboard “has caught the eye — and the ire — of some who think it is a slam on gender equality.”

Some? How many? Who are they? Are their thoughts representative?

The newspaper puts forward one person, “Winston-Salem business owner Molly Grace,” to say: “It does not say anything that suggests that men and women are equal role players in the home.”

“It really marginalizes and hurts people,” she added.

Are her views representative of many others? A majority? Of the thousands who drive past the billboard, how may agree, how many find it silly but unimportant, and how many don’t care? Would she mind if this news item draws attention to her business? Hard to say.

The main trick here is that the N&O has found one person who has an opinion, and is touting her views as important. Are they? The N&O doesn’t know. But the reporter has stumbled across, out of the thousands who have glimpsed the billboard, one person who has some emotion over it, and that’s enough for a story.

Unfortunately, most of us readers won’t catch how little substance the story has.

Slanted headline

Of course, the quickest, easiest way to slant a story is to fiddle with the headline. The same N&O website had a Charles Krauthammer/Washington Post column headlined: “US foreign policy amid a ‘Madman’ President Trump.”

The first thing a would-be journalist learns is that many readers read only the headline; those who read further usually have taken a crucial first impression from the headline.

The association of words is vital. Professional communicators all know this. That’s why, for instance, a restaurant menu will tout the “delicious appetizers” and “luscious desserts.” Your mind may recognize the adjectives, but your mouth will water anyway.

From the very beginning, this headline links “Madman” and “Trump.” And we typical newspaper readers are hardly conscious of it.

So is Krauthammer calling the president a madman? The opposite is true. He is no Trump fan, but he recognizes the power of the classic “good cop/bad cop” ploy.

The real point of the column is that the flamboyant, unpredictable president has surrounded himself with experienced foreign policy experts. Krauthammer writes:

“This suggests that the peculiar and discordant makeup of the U.S. national security team – traditionalist lieutenants, disruptive boss – might reproduce the old Nixonian ‘Madman Theory.’ That’s when adversaries tread carefully because they suspect the U.S. president of being unpredictable, occasionally reckless and potentially crazy dangerous. Henry Kissinger, with Nixon’s collaboration, tried more than once to exploit this perception to pressure adversaries.”

In other words, the column in fact suggests the president uses his public persona to create leverage for the diplomats and generals who implement the policies. In this view, Trump isn’t a madman, he’s (duh!) a cagy dealmaker.

You don’t have to buy that conclusion to see the point: The headline sets up our perceptions of the actual column. Many people will skim the column and won’t even get to the real gist of it. The misleading headline will influence more people than the actual column.

The examples above are almost subliminal in their impact, but that makes them all the more effective. Multiply these by the media messages we are surrounded with all the time, and you see the danger.

By all means, beware of fake news. But, just as important, every day when you look at a newspaper or watch TV or surf the Internet, beware of how a great deal of all the news is subtly shaped and twisted to mislead you.

]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/fake-news-beware-news/feed/4Nov. 2016 Civitas Newspaper: Election Battleshttp://www.nccivitas.org/2017/nov-2016-civitas-newspaper-election-battles/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/nov-2016-civitas-newspaper-election-battles/#respondTue, 31 Jan 2017 19:43:29 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=22036Though the election was over, our November/December NC Capitol Connection showed Civitas was still fighting for election fairness by taking legal action to ensure all votes are counted fairly. Also, the paper analyzed the election results, discussed how easy it would be to rig an election, and reported on our lawsuit over Roy Cooper’s practice as attorney general of channeling fine and forfeiture money meant for schoolchildren to favored crony groups.

]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/nov-2016-civitas-newspaper-election-battles/feed/0Oct. 2016 Civitas Newspaper: Study Highlights NC Gainshttp://www.nccivitas.org/2017/oct-2016-civitas-newspaper-study-highlights-nc-gains/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/oct-2016-civitas-newspaper-study-highlights-nc-gains/#respondTue, 31 Jan 2017 17:28:25 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=22032A new academic study shows that the state’s 2013 tax and fiscal reforms are paying off in the form of more jobs, bigger paychecks, as an earlier study predicted. It also highlighted a Civitas investigation revealing a State Board of Elections official had been spreading misleading, and possibly illegal, information about helping people to register to vote.

]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/oct-2016-civitas-newspaper-study-highlights-nc-gains/feed/0Sept. 2016 Civitas Newspaper: Tax Reform Workedhttp://www.nccivitas.org/2017/sept-2016-civitas-newspaper-tax-reform-worked/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/sept-2016-civitas-newspaper-tax-reform-worked/#respondTue, 31 Jan 2017 17:05:40 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=22022The Sept. 2016 edition of NC Capitol Connection heralded a report tying the state’s economic growth to the tax and fiscal reforms of 2013. The paper also followed election and political news, examined the truth about teach pay, and included popular features such as employment news.

]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2017/sept-2016-civitas-newspaper-tax-reform-worked/feed/0Trump in Raleigh: What Has Changed?http://www.nccivitas.org/2016/21610/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2016/21610/#commentsTue, 08 Nov 2016 19:29:17 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=21610I saw Donald Trump at Dorton Arena 11 months ago, and I saw him there (on the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh) again yesterday.

What changed?

First, the crowd. Last time, as I wrote, the crowd was rather loose and raucous. They were like fans of a stand-up comedian, laughing and applauding as he spouted their favorite zingers.

Monday, they again crowded the arena. Yes, they cheered and applauded their favorite lines. They booed the media and Hillary Clinton when Trump zinged them. They applauded and chanted vigorously.

In another sense, however, it seemed to be a more serious crowd. They weren’t there so much to be entertained, though as Trump himself says, “What’s more fun than a Trump rally?”

My totally subjective take is, first, that even supporters are still curious about him. That means they are still scrutinizing him seriously.

To explain what I mean, I think I know what President Hillary Clinton would be like. I’m not eager for that, but I think I know what she will do, and I bet most voters also think they know what she will do.

Trump … He’s still an unknown, in many ways. He never has held elective office. How will he respond? That’s a genuine question. And, let’s face it, he’s an eccentric person with a voluble personality.

So, will he really build a wall? Will he bomb the @#$% out of ISIS? Will he make America great again? I would guess that many at Dorton Arena came to do a last-minute check on whether he seems to be kind of man who might be able to do all that, and more. They weren’t just there for kicks.

Second, I think the crowd was serious because the news suggests he is now more serious. Eleven months ago, he basically said his policies could be found on his campaign website. Um, that’s the kind of answer a customer service rep gives when the company guidelines say to get off the phone with an annoying customer.

On Monday, however, his speech had more substance. In this case, the policies were the bricks, the barbed comments and wisecracks were just the mortar holding it all together. I would even speculate that people came, wonder of wonders, to hear what his policies are.

Last December’s crowd was like people going to hear a show. Yesterday’s was more like students going to hear a popular, entertaining professor give a lecture. Think of that as a hypothesis: People came to hear Trump because they wanted to learn something.

I know I’m going out on a limb there.

By the way, in the interests of fairness, I did try to get into Hillary Clinton’s midnight rally at North Carolina State University. But Reynolds Coliseum was full by the time I got there. So good for her and her campaign. It just goes to show that if some big-name entertainers and Bill Clinton put on a free show on a college campus, students (and adults) won’t stay away just because Hillary is there.

Turning back to Dorton Arena, in addition to the audience, others were in attendance who were absent in December: politicians.

What was striking, to me anyway, was how relaxed they seemed to be. McCrory, for instance, noted that as he campaigns, people sort of sidle up to him and whisper, “Pat, I’m with you.” At Dorton Arena, when he called out, “Are you with me?” the crowd gave a resounding cheer and applauded enthusiastically.

Huckabee quipped, “The only difference between the Sopranos and the Clintons is that the Sopranos didn’t save their emails.”

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who proclaimed, “Blue lives matter!”, was especially impressive. I’ve seen him on TV and the Internet, but there in the arena, dressed in black with a big cowboy hat, he had a powerful presence.

In short, many politicians have often seemed skittish about Trump. Yesterday, however, the crowd and the setting seemed to energize them, and I’ve seen a number of them many times before. Before a Trump crowd, with him waiting in the wings, some of the politicians seemed stronger and more relaxed than they usually do.

It’s often been speculated that Republicans might oppose a President Trump. But could the opposite be true? Could a Trump-led party be more dynamic and confident?

One group was missing yesterday: Protesters. They interrupted his November speech several times. None showed up Monday. It would be mere speculation to wonder if this was connected to the revelation that Democrat operatives had funded and directed many anti-Trump protests.

It was the crowd that interrupted him, at times, chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” and “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”

My sense was that the people there feel they too are part of the show, and when they feel it’s time to say something, they’re part of the show too, and they go ahead. Trump nods along, applauds, gives a thumbs-up, then swings back into his talk.

Which underlines what Trump has been claimed: this is a movement of the people.

For conservatives, a popular movement is neither good nor bad, in itself. Our constitution aims to channel and direct the wishes of the voters through settled institutions. The whole trick is to properly balance the will of the people with effective institutions, while protecting the rights of communities, minorities and individuals.

But could a Trump administration do so?

Monday he seemed more serious than 11 months ago. Sure, there were the one-liners, the standard riffs, the bombast and bluster. He’s still a showman. He doesn’t want people fidgeting in their seats. But, in perhaps the real upset of the campaign, he basically delivered a typical campaign speech that at least outlined what he would try to do in the Oval Office.

Monday, he laid out a number of ideas most conservatives would be comfortable with. He insisted that a top item on his agenda would be repealing and replacing Obamacare. He would stop payments sent to the United Nations to cut global warming, and instead would route the money to rebuilding inner cities.

He also said he would cut taxes, and especially would cut corporate taxes down to be among the lowest in the world. He at least seems to realize that high taxes are driving corporations, and their cash and jobs, away, and that cutting taxes could help bring them back.

To be sure, corporate tax cuts don’t always excite ordinary taxpayers. But at the Trump rally, people applauded the line. It may be that Trump has helped his followers make the connection many people don’t: if taxes are lowered, companies have more money to hire workers and buy things from other companies, starting a virtuous cycle of growth and job creation.

Moreover, he said he aimed to rebuild America’s inner cities. “I will fix it,” he said, in effect telling the urban poor, “What the hell do you have to lose? We’ll all fix it. … There is tremendous potential in the inner city.”

And his audience, mostly white, cheered as heartily for that as almost anything else. That raises yet one more possibility: That he not only champions ordinary people, he might be able to change them.

I can’t pretend to predict if he will win or be a good president. There is not enough information to decide either question.

But I did get an impression of how he had changed. In December, he was very much the showman, obviously having a good time, enjoying the attention and fuss. It’s not that he disdained the job. It might be that as an entrepreneur he was willing to take a flyer and see what happened.

Monday, I thought he had moved beyond that, and become a much more aware and committed leader.

Somewhere along the line he seems to have gotten more serious about the whole thing. They say John Kennedy when running for president was shocked by the poverty he saw in Appalachia, and it changed him. Did something like that happen to Trump? He seemed genuinely outraged that, according to him, 70,000 factories have closed in the U.S. since NAFTA was signed.

Trump noted how he had traveled all over America, and said, “I’ve really gotten to love the people of this country.” Did his campaign put him through the furnace, and make him (relatively) more thoughtful, more serious, more empathetic?

By tomorrow we may have a better idea. After he left, and we filed out, a song came over the loudspeaker. The Rolling Stones were singing, “You can’t always get what you want … but if you try sometime, you get what you need.”

Tuesday Event Will Outline Voter Education Efforts

Raleigh – Representatives of several organizations will explain Tuesday why Wake County voters should reject a proposed sales tax increase on the November ballot, and they will also outline associated efforts they are undertaking to educate voters.

Representatives of the Civitas Institute, the Wake County Taxpayers Association, and the John Locke Foundation, plus concerned Wake County citizens, will speak at 2 p.m. Tuesday at the Civitas office conference room (Suite 100), 805 Spring Forest Road, Raleigh.

The proposed sales tax increase on the Nov. 8 ballot will be earmarked for mass transit.

Who: Representatives of the Civitas Institute, Wake County Taxpayers Association, and John Locke Foundation, and concerned citizens.

For more information, or to interview Civitas President Francis De Luca, contact Jim Tynen, 919-834-2099, or jim.tynen@nccivitas.org.

Founded in 2005, the Civitas Institute is a Raleigh, NC-based, 501(c)(3) nonprofit policy organization committed to creating a North Carolina whose citizens enjoy liberty and prosperity derived from limited government, personal responsibility and civic engagement. To that end, Civitas develops and advocates for conservative policy solutions to improve the lives of all North Carolinians.

]]>http://www.nccivitas.org/2016/21467/feed/1Why Losing One Basketball Game Is No Big Dealhttp://www.nccivitas.org/2016/why-losing-one-basketball-game-is-no-big-deal/
http://www.nccivitas.org/2016/why-losing-one-basketball-game-is-no-big-deal/#commentsTue, 16 Aug 2016 18:56:14 +0000http://www.nccivitas.org/?p=18994If there’s a contest for the most bogus statistic the North Carolina Left has created this year, here’s an early favorite: the laughable claim that losing one basketball game – even the NBA All-Star Game – will cost Charlotte and the state $100 million in lost business.

This phony stat is repeated over and over in the kerfuffle over HB 2; the implication is that the fuss is hurting the state’s overall economy. But that’s just typical for the Left and their media minions: fabricating phony numbers, then parroting them over and over. First, let’s take a closer look at the hidden assumption that special sports events generate windfalls for local communities.

Well, if that were so, Detroit would be a fiscal Eden. As Civitas’ Brian Balfour points out, in the mid- to late-2000s Detroit hosted the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, the NCAA Final Four, and the Super Bowl. So its economy is in great shape, right?

Um, Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013.

In fact, in recent years researchers have shown again and again that most big sporting events have a negligible effect on a community’s economic health. Economists Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys in a revealing paper surveyed the research and found that most big sporting events had little or no impact on local economies – or even a negative effect. For example, when Houston hosted the MLB All-Star Game in July 2004, sales tax receipts were less than in a typical July.

We can turn back to North Carolina for another revealing example. The NBA once punished Charlotte much more harshly. The league cancelled not just one basketball game but all Hornets games for two whole years – when the league let the franchise move to New Orleans after the 2002 season.

So did the Charlotte economy collapse? Of course not. For those two years, its population and economy continued to grow at a rapid clip.

In fact, the entire effect of a big-league sports franchise does little for a regional economy.

“If you ever had a consensus in economics, this would be it,” Michael Leeds, a sports economist at Temple University who was quoted at marketplace.org about the impact of sports teams on cities. The bottom line, he said: “There is no impact.”

Why? Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose the NBA never picked Charlotte for the All-Star Game in the first place. Would every Mecklenburg County hotel and restaurant be empty that weekend? Would the streets be deserted and businesses shuttered in despair?

Of course not. Both residents and visitors would be shopping at stores, attending events, and seeing the sights.

To be sure, without the All-Star Game, there will be some in the hospitality industry who will lose out on some extra business that weekend, but most of that money will instead be spent elsewhere in Charlotte’s economy. Instead of going to the game, people will be patronizing local businesses, from restaurants to auto deals, and otherwise enjoying themselves or engaged in productive activities.

Modern economists now realize that a big sporting event just displaces other economic activity. Local residents, knowing downtown will be crowded, stay home. Other potential visitors who aren’t interested in basketball will travel to other cities or visit Charlotte at other times.

In other words, the whole idea that losing a basketball game will cost Charlotte a hundred million bucks is fraudulent. The reality is that any city’s or state’s economy is not based on one basketball game, but on helping businesses grow.

That in turn is based on more foundational factors, especially how little government hampers job creation, the quality of infrastructure, how friendly government is to business, and the quality of the workforce. That’s what will really drive an economy, not one weekend of basketball.

More important, we should extend that insight to the rest of the tales being tossed around about economic pressure applied over the state’s bathroom privacy law. The media has been peddling horror stories about how much the law will cost our state. But in fact those stories are basically the same as the All-Star Game spin.

Remember, North Carolina’s economy is larger than that of many nations, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Austria or Belgium. The loss of one basketball game has no impact.

Nor is there a sign that a threatened boycott is having any impact. Sure, a few out-of-state companies figured they could score some PR points by announcing how liberal they are. But there are few if any signs this is having a major impact. Some of these companies are finding their bottom lines are suffering, suggesting they are suffering their own backlash.

The vast majority of companies, however, will do what they’ve always done: go where they have the best chance to do business and make money. Many of them will do what companies have been doing for decades: looking at North Carolina and seeing it’s a good place for people to live and for companies to prosper.

And, of course, that what’s the legislature and governor have been doing in recent years. They have gotten state spending under control, cut taxes, reformed the unemployment system, and otherwise made North Carolina a better place to live and work. Unemployment has plummeted so that our jobless rate now equals the nation’s as a whole. That’s more important to businesses than anything else.

Remember that when wild figures are being tossed around about how the issue has affected the state. The Left can’t win on the core concern: providing privacy and safety in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers. So it has to gin up phony figures and PR spin.

Finally, this whole hoopla is a good reminder for us to be skeptical of everything the media and their allies tell us. Use common sense and look at the economic realities, not incredible statistics.

As for any benefits from a basketball game, remember that the Hornets can bring at least two more high-profile NBA games to Charlotte in 2017 … just by making the playoffs. That’s another reason to root for the hometown team.